Many efforts have been made to solve the Healthcare IT industry problems that hide within the walls of most hospitals, PHO's, IPA's and practices. Typically though, issues are exacerbated by all the vendors who build a proprietary client server solution to fix one problem within one organization and then try to apply that solution across the healthcare IT industry as a utopian solution with the expectation that everyone will utilize their solution without any way for the data, the application or device collected data to be passed to the next application that sits on a server two feet from it on the same network. This type of solution is the most costly in every way possible. The cost of ownership when you break down the benefits versus revenue is never justified. This creates an unlevel playing field for healthcare organizations versus healthcare technology vendors.
The healthcare organizations typically do not have the skill sets in-house to design IT solutions beyond the healthcare organization's needs of that moment. This makes it very easy to purchase healthcare software and devices that will not communicate without yet another piece of software, servers and skill sets that are few and far between. Building interfaces so all software can communicate with each other has fallen into the same place as the utopian software solutions. (Example: We just need lab system results to connect to this electronic medical record.)